Exit Kingdom

searched her out for a long time, Moses continues, Abraham and me. Sometimes we’d hear storiesthat sounded like they could of been her – but we never saw her again. Ten years
now. Could be I’m cursed to tail women my whole life. My wife and daughter – they got away from me. Mattie the Vestal – who ran when I sent her runnin.
    He stops again and seems to consider how long he has been chasing people who refuse to be found.
    It was only one girl I had any talent for huntin, he says.She – well, she cost me my eye, and the price of my brother, finally, in exchange for Maury there.
    He gestures with a nod of his chin to the large mute sleeping at the perimeter of the group.
    Just a young girl, that one. I bear her no grudge. One thing you could say about her, she balanced the log books like a true accountant of life. She – yeah, she got away from me
too.
    He pausesone last time – and this time the silence feels like a bottomless chasm everyone, all the listeners and the teller too, stands on the precipice of.
    But that’s a different story altogether, Moses Todd says finally. I guess this story here’s found its finish.
    He and his companion travel with the caravan one more day. When the night falls again, he is silent – as though his story of the previousnight has exhausted him in a profound way. One
of the children, a toddler, approaches him sleepily. The one-eyed man reaches out his hand as if to tousle the child’s blond hair, but at the last moment he pulls his arm back – as
though afraid his touch could never be light enough to keep the youngster from shattering harm.
    In the morning, both men are gone.
    The caravan continues itsslow progress over the plain in the direction of many Americas – more than can be counted. Three days later, it is attacked by marauders. The caravaners manage
finally to repel the attack, but not without significant losses. Half the travellers are killed, but half survive.

The Reapers Are The Angels
    Set in the same bleak world as
Exit Kingdom
, but at a different time, there was
The Reapers Are The Angels
. . .
    Older than her years and completely alone, Temple is just trying to live one day at a time in a post-apocalyptic world, where the undead roam endlessly, and the remnants of
mankind who have survived seem, at times, to retain little humanity themselves.

    Temple has known nothing else. This is the world she was born into. Her journey takes her to far-flung places, to people struggling to maintain some semblance of civilization – and to
those who have created a new world order for themselves.
    When she comes across the helpless Maury, she attempts to set one thing right. If she can just get him back to his family then maybe it will bringforgiveness for some of the terrible things
she’s done in her past. Because Temple has had to fight to survive; along the road she’s made enemies – and one vengeful man is determined that, in a world gone mad, killing her
is the only thing that makes sense . . .
    Read on for an extract

One
    GOD IS a slick god. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe.
    Like those fish all disco-lit in the shallows. That was something, a marvel with no compare that she’s been witness to. It was deep night when she saw it, but the moon was so bright it
cast hard shadows everywhere on the island. So bright it was almost brighterthan daytime because she could see things clearer, as if the sun were criminal to the truth, as if her eyes were eyes of
night. She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the moon pure and straight, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patterwaves tickled her
ankles. And that’s when she saw it, a school of tiny fish, all darting aroundlike marbles in a chalk circle, and they were lit up electric, mostly silver but some gold and pink too. They
came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel their little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing
under
the moon and
in
the moon at the same time. And that was
something she hadn’t seen before. A decade and a half, thereabouts, roaming the planet earth, andshe’s never seen that before.
    And you could say the world has gone to black damnation, and you could say the children of Cain are holding sway over the good and the righteous – but here’s what Temple knows: she
knows that whatever hell the world went to, and